While everyone expects Apple to make its gear thinner, it will have a long way to go before it gets as thin as Lenovo’s new Yoga.

Lenovo has dumped its hard keyboard in favour of a versatile touch panel that turns into a smartphone-like virtual keyboard, a draw pad, or a digital notepad.

The new touch input panel has a back-lit virtual keyboard. Apparently this is Lenovo's ambitious attempt to break a decades old habit of using one-dimensional hard keyboards.

Its price will start at $499, and come with Windows or Android. Lenovo hasn't provided a shipment date for the device. However, more devices under the Yoga Book brand will follow, and the touch input panel will also go into an upcoming Chromebook.

The Yoga Book has a full HD 10.1-inch touchscreen and can be used as a laptop or tablet and the new input panel should not hurt Yoga Book's estimated 13 hours of battery life, either.The new input panel took two years to develop and test and will appeal to a young, mobile-first crowd used to virtual keyboards on mobile devices.

You can even place paper on the input panel to take notes, which will be entered into the device. Lenovo will include an ink pen that also serves as a stylus. This is expected to appeal to students who will want to write notes and draw with a stylus.

Lenovo has included some mobile typing features in Yoga Book. It will include autocorrect and predictive text, which speeds up typing with suggestions. Algorithms help the device pick up user typing trends. Of course this will not work for those who have to type a lot. Lenovo said that those imputing shedloads of data will not be able to use such a keyboard.

The Yoga Book will have 4GB memory, 64GB storage, an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, and a microSD slot for expandable storage. It runs on an Intel Atom Cherry Trail processor.

Following up on the success of its Gorilla Glass, Corning launched Willow Glass, an even thinner and more flexible display glass technology than those currently on the market.

Willow Glass can be made to be only 0.05mm thick, which is a significant step up from the current displays. A quick look at the specs of Gorilla Glass reveal that the thinnest version is 0.5mm thick.

The key is in the manufacturing process, as the company used a so called roll-to-roll process at 500°C. This produces a thin, bendable and scratch resistant sheets of Willow glass that are only 100 microns thick. In fact, Willow Glass can be rolled up into a 2 inch radius without sustaining damage.

Such a thin and flexible, yet tough, material can be used for just about anything, from smartphones, tablets, netbooks and even solar cells. The flexibility also allows for freedom of design, enabling for some serious curves. Willow Glass,

The company claims that the price of Willow Glass isn’t too high due to efficiency of the process. If the success of Gorilla Glass, which has been featured in numerous smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks and even TVs, is anything to go by, we’ll be probably be seeing Willow Glass on many new devices pretty soon.

You can get a clearer idea of the manufacturing process on the video below.

The Tame Apple Press, which gets excited over everything that Apple makes, has had a bit of a brain fart when it comes to Jobs Mob's latest inovation.According to Reuters, Jobs' Mob is pushing for the adoption of smaller sim cards for smartphones.

If Apple gets its way and a smaller SIM card, then the microSIM found in the iPad and iPhone 4, will be standardised. Apparently the fruity cargo cult is trying to persuade wireless carriers worldwide to use the SIM card.

All that is fair enough, but the Tame Apple press did not think that story was sexy enough. We did a Google search and a number of them were reporting that the Sim will enable Jobs' Mob to come up with “thinner” phones and iPads. In this headline for example it is implied.

The downside of this is that a Sim card is pretty thin already and a smaller sim card would be er... the same thickness. If Jobs gets telcos to use the smaller Sims, it will not make the slightest difference to the thickness of the gadgets.

Given the lay out of most phones the size of the Sim will probably not change much in the external design of the phone at all. Still that never stopped the Tame Apple Press from attempting to give Jobs' Mob a free advert.